[Captivate General] br123:
Hi everyone,

I've been searching for an app to do this but I haven't found one. I might write up one soon but I'm too busy, so today I found a relatively simple way to do it manually. Basically, this gets Facebook contact information, including email and phone numbers, of all your friends and copies them to your Gmail contacts. There are quite a few steps, but this is really something you have to do once. When this is all said and done, your Google contacts will have all the necessary information, and you don't have to worry about rejoining all the contacts if you lose the data (by flashing a new ROM, for instance).

Things this will not do:

1. Grab contact photos. There might be a way around that, but I'm not sure.

2. Link social media, like statuses and such. This is all STATIC information.

3. This only works on Galaxy S phones (I think). Other phones might be able to follow the same general procedure if they're able to import ALL facebook contact into the phonebook.

This assumes that all of your contacts on your phone are synced to your primary Gmail account.

So, here's the procedure.

1. Create a backup of your Google contacts, save them to your Desktop. You can do this by going to Gmail -> contacts -> Actions -> Export.

2. To be safe, you can export your phone's contacts as well, in case something goes wrong. To do this: Contact -> Menu -> Import/Export -> Export to SD.

3. Import ALL of your Facebook friends into your contacts. To do this: Menu-> Get friends -> Check all of them, then press Save. This part can take awhile, so be patient.

4. Export all of your contacts to your SD card again. Contacts -> Menu -> Import/Export -> Export to SD. This includes ALL your contacts, existing and facebook contacts, but the important part is that the Facebook contact information is included. The file will be named 0000x.vcf, where x is some number, and it should be located under /sdcard/external_sd.

5. Transfer that .vcf file to your computer. You'll need a file manager like Astro, and you can email the file to yourself.

6. In google contacts, create a group called "Original Contacts", and add all of your current contacts to that group.

7. Also, create another group called "Facebook" (or whatever).

8. In google contacts, import your .vcf file, which was exported from your phone. To import: Contacts -> Actions -> Import. Check the option "Add all contacts to this group:" and pick the group "Facebook".

9. When that's done, go to "My Contacts" -> Actions -> Find and merge duplicates. Check to be sure that the right contacts are being merged, then press OK. All of your existing contacts that have associated Facebook information will be merged.

10. Go to your "Original" contacts group, and remove the "Facebook" contact label from all of them.

11. Go to the "Facebook" group, select all of them contacts, and delete them.

12. Ta da!!! All of your original contacts now have Facebook information right in Google contacts, and data portability is no longer an issue! All the contacts you didn't care about are also gone as well!

13. This step is optional. By doing this, you might find that you'll get contacts that have duplicate entries for phone numbers. To fix this, you can export the "Original" contacts group as a CSV file, open it up in Excel, and quickly remove all the duplicate phone number entries. This is actually a very quick process - it took me about 2 minutes. Save that file, then go into Google and delete ALL of your contacts. Then, import that CSV file you just edited. Now, you have all of your contacts but all the duplicate data entries have been removed.

14. Clean up: you can delete the Facebook group and the 'Original' contact group, as those were just to keep things organized.

Photos are probably not preserved. They weren't for me - other people might have different results based on whether they perform the optional step or not.

I hope this helps everyone!